Arlington isn’t waiting for spring. This juvenile male is making serious tracks to the north — the first of this winter’s class of tagged owls to show more than just some late-winter wanderlust. In just the past week he’s moved more than 120 miles (200 km) from south of Eu Claire, Wisconsin, northwest into Kanabec County, Minnesota — and more … Read More
Another Loss
Apologies for the lag in updates; everyone on Project SNOWstorm does this in their spare time, and sometimes spare time is hard to come by. I was out of town and largely off the grid last week, and unable to post. Sorry to have kept you waiting. Unfortunately, the biggest news is the saddest — we’ve lost another owl, our … Read More
Across the Bay and Off the Ice
It’s been quite a week since the last update. The low point, obviously, was confirming Hereford’s death, but there’s also been a lot of very cool news from the other owls, and that’s what we’ll focus on this time. We won’t hit every owl (like Stella, whose great photo our friend Dan Lafortune got on Amherst Island recently) but check … Read More
Shaking Things Up
The days are getting longer, and right on schedule, we’re seeing some restlessness start to appear among this winter’s cohort of owls. But there’s a lot of ground to cover this week, including the second “bomb cyclone” of the winter on the Northeast coast, an ice-queen owl on the Great Lakes, and a turbine-dodging bird on the prairies. Here are … Read More
Weekly Update
It’s been quite a week, with new owls in five states — but there’s lots happening with the rest of this winter’s cadre, too. Here’s a roundup of where we stand with all 24 of the snowy owls we’re currently tracking. It’s a lot of ground — geographically and metaphorically — to cover. The most intriguing movements this week were … Read More
Who is Where?
Time for a weekend update on our 2017-18 cohort — the largest we’ve had since our first winter four years ago. We’ll start west and work our way east, but it’s a lot of owls. Ashtabula remains pretty faithful to his general territory near Sanborn, ND, and lately has been spending a lot of time roosting in a grove of … Read More
Neighbors
One of the goals we set for ourselves this winter is to track the movements and interactions of neighboring owls, as we did several years ago with Whitefish Point and Chippewa in northern Michigan. So this winter we’ve made an effort to trap and tag snowies in close proximity to one another, starting with Island Beach and Lenape on the … Read More
Bancroft and Austin (and Badger and Arlington and…)
As we mentioned, last week was a busy one at Project SNOWstorm. As we were adding two newly tagged owls on Amherst Island in Ontario, we also had two new birds sporting transmitters in Wisconsin, where we’re partnering with a number of organizations to track owls this winter. The newest recruits are: —Bancroft, a juvenile male caught Jan. 16 on … Read More
Back to Amherst
Things are really happening in a whirlwind here these days, and we have a lot of news to share. Today, it’s two newly tagged owls on Amherst Island, one of the most famous owl spots in North America. (I also made an attempt to tag an owl in northeast Ohio, but came up short — that’s a story for another … Read More